Study guide Art 108 - Sacramento State



Classicism in Crisis: Gros to Delacroix

Thomas Crow

Force of Arms

1. When did the Romantic style arrive and what were its characteristics?

2. What was its relation to Classical art?

3. Who was its chief innovator and whose values did he uphold?

4. Did he study in Rome? Why is that important?

5. What was the new Consulate that commissioned him to commemorate what battle?

6. What were the objections to the composition of the painting, The Battle of Nazareth?

7. Why did the artist compose the painting the way he did?

8. What formal did Gros employ to pull the composition together?

9. What was innovative about the subject matter of The Battle of Nazareth (1801)?

10. Was the full-scale version ever completed? Why?

11. How was the subject of Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa (1804) different from Gros’s 1801 battle scene?

12. Where is Jaffa? Why were Napoleon’s armies there?

13. How did Gros reverse the meaning of nudity in painting? What did he borrow from David’s Brutus and why? How did he transform the meaning of David’s composition?

An Imperial Antiquity

14. Besides propaganda and glorification of Napoleon, what characterized ambitious painting under the empire?

15. What was the favored manner of the empire period?

16. Who was Giovanni Smmariva?

17. How did he use art to improve his status? What is a parvenu?

18. Who was Antonio Canova and how did he establish his prestige?

19. What formal quality characterizes Canova’s sculpture overall that Canova’s Perseus (1801) exemplifies?

20. Who commissioned Pauline Borghese as Venus? Who was she? How was the sculpture viewed and by whom?

21. Which of Canova’s sculptures was most famous in the 19th century? Who owned it and how did he display it?

22. Who painted Crime Pursued by Vengeance and Justice? Who commissioned it? What earlier artwork influenced it?

23. Was Pierre-Paul Prou’hon part of the Davidian circle? Describe his unorthodox technique and explaine how his manner was “highly individual for times.” Use specific paintings to describe the effect.

24. What two collectors commissioned Pierre-Narcisse Guerin’s Aurora and Cephalus (1811)? Why did foreign collectors commission French artists? What painting influenced Guerin’s?

25. What painting by Girodet played on the sensibility of Sommariva? What is the literary narrative of the painting? What figure is “exotic” – why?

26. Why does Crow consider Girodet’s Endymion (1791) powerful and his Pygmalion and Galatea (1813-19) a failure?

The Artist Hero in the Face of the Empire

27. How is the failure of Girodet’s Pygmalion due to the condition of Classicism under the Empire, and how is it explained by comparing Pygmalion with the Revolt at Cairo (1810)?

28. Why isThéodore Géricault called the first great Romantic and how did he “revive the Revolutionary ideal of the independent, public-minded artist, impatient for glory and indifferent to merely monetary awards”? Which artists held those values before Gericault?

29. What was groundbreaking about The Charging Light Cavaryman (chausseur) (1812)?

30. What were the deficiencies of the painting and how did Gericault compensate for them?

31. What happened in 1814 that caused a power shift in France and Europe?

32. How was Gericault’s The Wounded Heavy Cavalryman (curassier) (1814) a pendant for his Light Cavalryman of 1812? What overwhelms the failings of execution in the Wounded Cavalryman? What became of the two paintings?

Return from the Wreckage

33. What changes had occurred in the Paris art world by 1816 with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy? What subjects were wanted and what paintings does Crow give as examples of restoration artworks?

34. What is the message of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Henri de Rochejaquelein (1817) and how is that message conveyed?

35. Why did Restoration paintings like these “drain the moral authority from the Davidian figural canon”?

36. What explanation does Crow give for Gericault’s ability to rise above the cynicism and vacuity of the circle around Vernet?

37. What is the subject of Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819)? Describe the story. What moment does the painting portray?

38. Was Gericault’s painting true to the facts of the story?

39. What was Gericault’s process?

40. What was so “catastrophic” about the salon hanging of the Raft?

41. What is “the paradox of the Raft?

Punishments of the Damned

42. Was Gericault’s Raft honored at the time? How did the artist react?

43. Why did Gericault go to London and what series did he produce there?

44. When were the London paintings discovered? What do we know about them?

45. What “science” of mental illness was believed in the 1820s and how do Gericault’s paintings seem to adhere to them?

46. How is the view of heroism evident in the Raft also evident in the London series?

47. What was the relationship between Gericault and Eugene Delacroix?

48. What is the literary source for Delacroix’s Bark of Dante and Virgil? How does that and his other literary sources mark a change from Classical art?

49. Did Delacroix study at the French Academy in Rome? Where did he travel later in his career? Why is that significant?

50. How is Delacroix’s Bark influenced by Gericault’s Raft?

51. According to Crow, what deficiencies does Delacroix’s style compensate for? Describe the style.

52. How is Delacroix’s painting the “logical outcome of developments reaching back into the 1790s and beyond”? What price did the artist pay for breaking with the standard procedures of the discipline?

53. What was the situation for the artist? How dependent was he on attracting public attention?

54. How is Delacroix’s Dante and Virgil like Gericault’s Charging Light Cavalryman?

55. Was Dante and Virgil a success?

56. What is the story behind Delacroix’s Massacre at Scio (1824)?

57. Why did the Romantics and liberals of Europe care so much about this story?

58. How is Massacre at Scio an homage to Gericault? What different circumstances did Delacroix have to deal with?

59. What does “philhellene” sentiment mean, and how were the confusions there comparable to the composition of the Massacre at Scio? Where did Delacroix get the images for the painting? Did the artist truly understand the situation he represented? Why?

Suicide of the Despot

60. How is J-A-D Ingre’s Vow of Louis XIII a “pastiche” of Raphael? How does that make it an “unstable concatenation of parts and degrees of fictionality”?

61. How was the painting received officially?

62. How does Ingre’s Apotheoisis of Homer fossilize the Western classical tradition?

63. Why is this painting an apt monument to the social order of the time in France?

64. What connotations did the Romantic style hold for conservatives?

65. Did Ingres continue the Davidian link between Republicanism and Classicism? Did David at this time (since 1815)?

66. How does Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus respond to the “artistic impass of the late Restoration”? How does it challenge Ingres?

67. What is the story behind the Death of Sardanapalus? Who wrote it?

68. What makes this painting historically significant? Why does Crow say that with this painting the artist “comes into his own as a history painter”? (79)

69. How was Liberty Leading the People at odds with the status quo?

70. Describe the meaning of the painting and how Delacroix conveyed it.

71. How is the figure of Liberty simultaneously “a sculptural prescnce and …mental abstraction.”

72. What traces remain of Classicism?

73. What was the crisis of Classicism? What caused it? Which paintings best exemplify it?

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